Glebe Report

BOOKS
61111,
Art and academia mesh in author's career
By
Sharon
Drache
ANOTHER COUNTRY
writings by and about Henry Kreisel.
Edited by Shirley Neuman. NeWest
Press, 362 pages, $19.95 cloth, $9.95
paper.
Henry Kreisel is a man
obsessed with remembering
the past at the same time as
he continually discovers the
present. Writings by and
about him reflect the image
of a man standing between
two worlds while also providing
a detailed study of
the successful combination
of a richly led academic and
literary life. In her introductions
to diverse selections
including a diary,
personal correspondence,
some early and recent fiction
and several essays, editor
Shirley Neuman endeavours
to pay tribute to
Kreisel not only for his accomplishments
as an author'
and an academic but also for
his devotion to his adopted
country, Canada.
Immigration
She begins where Kriesel
began when he came to Canada
in 1940, not as an ordinary
immigrant but as a Jewish
refugee who had fled the
Anschluss in Austria in 1938
only to be welcomed at British
and subsequently Canadian
borders as an 'enemy
alien'. Fellow internee,
Eric Koch, described the unjust
incarceration in his
book Deemed Suspect: A Wartime
Blunder (1980) but
Kreisel's diary (some of
which is reproduced in
Koch's book) stands as an
unadorned archival document.
Later, in 1956, in a letter
to his close friend Robert
Weaver, Kreisel addresses
his sense of outrage at
being a double victim, first
of Nazi tyranny and then because
of his nationality.
He speaks to the paradox of
his internment which gave
him a block of time to read
and study precisely when he
needed it. "It should be
said that the camps here
were intellectually stimulating...the
place lousy with
doctors of all sorts, medicine,
philosophy and theology.
Sitting around a bunk at
night, an orthodox rabbi
would argue with a neo-Thom-
.
ist and a Marxist was having
it out with a Platonist...in
this casual manner I was initiated
into the world of
ideas." Kreisel claims the
most important event of his
own camp life was his decision
to write creatively,
not in his native German,
but in English. He tried to
get his hands on some books
by Canadian authors but couldn't.
To address his surprise
at that time and since
on the topic of discovery of
the Canadian literary landscape,
Neuman includes
Kreisel's hard-hitting, humorous
essay, 'Has Anyone
Here Heard of Marjorie
Pickthall?' written for the
100th anniversary issue of
Canadian Literature (Spring
1984).
The book reads like a memoir,
thanks to Neumans careful
sequencing and bridging
of selections. She traces
Kreisel's career from
his student days in English
language and literature at
the University of Toronto
in the mid-forties to the
publication of his highly
acclaimed first novel, The
Rich Man (1948). Kreisel'
comments on the literary
climate of the forties, not
in Montreal which we have
heard so much about from the
First Statement and Preview
people, but in Toronto.
The Modern Letters Club
was founded by Kreisel,
Robert Weaver, the late
Robert Sawyer and James
Reaney. Writers met to discuss
modern literature and
read their works in progress
"At the time E.J. Pratt was
at Victoria College and
Phillip Child was at Trinity
Northrop Frye was beginning
to exercise enormous influence
and Marshall McLuhan
was beginning his explorations
at St. Michael's."
Academic and author
Kreisel wrote his master's
thesis on poet A.M. Klein's
Hath Not a Jew (1940).
Klein had come to Canada
when he was school age and
Kreisel when he was eighteen.
It was exciting to young
Kreisel to find a literary
soul mate. Klein's ability
to embrace the Biblic and
Rabbinic simultaneously with
Canadian custom emboldened
Kreisel to affirm his own
Jewish heritage.
Neuman aptly portrays
Kreisel, the academic, alongside
Kreisel, the author,
for both aspects deal with
the man's essence. He was
himself an exile who had to
work doubly hard to make a influences in Kreisel's
contribution to his adopted writing. Joseph Conrad has
country. Being a creative been a literary presence
writer wasn't enough for much in the same way as
Kreisel. He wanted a time- Klein. But with Conrad,
bound occupation. He left Kreisel latched on to his
the University of Toronto to exile and his choice to
teach at the University of write in English instead of
Alberta. Among his accomp- his native Polish.
lishments since he began his T.S. Eliot's Waste Land
teaching career in 1947 were is also important. Kreisel
the introduction of the writes a memoir of Vienna,
first course in Canadian published here for the first
literature at that univer- time, in which he describes
sity, the Chairmanship of Vienna as a waste land city,
the English Department and a city of darkness and light,
the administrative role of and certainly not the Vienna
Vice President (Academic) he chooses to remember.
from 1970 to 1975.
Should Canadians wish to
learn about a writer steeped
in the tradition of
Goethe and Schiller who is
equally excited by A.M.
Klein (1909-1972) and Hugh
MacLennan, then Henry
Kreisel, the writer-teacher
is one of our best examples.
In a talk he gave for the
CBC on Problems of Writing
in Canada, he didn't agree
with Chester Duncan who said,
"We haven't discovered what
we are or where we are going
and therefore we haven't
much to say." Kreisel maintained
his own experience
had taught him otherwise.
He singled out for praise
two Canadian authors who had
lots to say about Canada,
Author Dr. Henry KriAsel his friends and former students,
Robert Kroetsch and
He was asked to stand for
Rudy Weibe.
the Presidency, says Neuman
The essence of this book
but he declined, choosing to
is the affirmation in one
devote his time to the other
man's writings that art and
facet of his personality,
academia do mesh and that
his writing, which with the
the Canadian literary landexception
of a second novel,
scape is flourishing.
The Betrayal (1964), several
academic and literary essays
and sprinkling of stories,
had been in limbo.
Editor Neuman describes
Kreisel as a slow, methodical
writer for whom periods
of not writing have always
been as important as periods
of creativity. One feeds
the other and after a lifetime
of teaching and university
administration, Kreisel
has in fact had a burst of
creative energy. In 1981,
he published a collection of
short fiction, The Almost
Meeting, which won the J.I.
Segal Literary Award.
The inclusion in this volume
of two recently written
stories, An Evening with
Sholem Aleichem and To Visit
Mother Rachel's Grave, respectively
underscores
Kreisel's devotion to the
tradition of Yiddish storytelling
and to the Biblical
past.
Interviews with Felix
Cherniavsky and Mervyn
Butovsky address literary
June 6, 1986, GLEBE REPORT -25